Four Slytherins who died for love (and one who lived)
I: Salazar Slytherin
Salazar Slytherin dies for Hogwarts, though he is several hundred miles away from the brick and mortar of the castle when he is struck down by mere disease. He refuses the help of muggle villagers, and he refuses to brew the potion that would save his life in those few days he knows it will take to die. Instead he sends his serpent familiar to the castle with a message for Godric and Rowena and Helga. It is the one concession he makes, and the message reaches them long after his body has gone cold, but it does not worry him. He is dead and gone, and future generations will think of him as they will, as a villain or usurper, or look to him as a false idol of hate and bigotry. Salazar knows that there will always be winners and losers in the stages of history, and he is content to play his part.
Hogwarts is his blood, pure, undiluted, its walls are his walls, its breaths are his breaths, and its life is his life. As long as it lives, he lives, and he cares for little else. Godric, Rowena and Helga bury his body beneath the southernmost foundations of the castle, with no marker for his grave but a small carved stone crest, set into the earth, and in time, the bones of the other three join him at north, east and west. And that is the final magic, he knows, and they have all died for Hogwarts, to make it whole.
II: The Bloody Baron
The Baron dies for a woman. She is the most radiant thing he has ever seen, and yet he does not love her right away. She grows on him. Her quiet smile, her sharp wit, her piercing eyes, they all spin their magic upon him until he is so ensnared that he will do anything for her. She believes that he loves her mother, and tells him that she will never love him while he stays by her mother's side. He knows how she hates her mother, how she stares at her mother with that look of mingled admiration and jealousy. He longs to tell her that it is not her mother that he sees in her, but her that he sees in her mother. It makes all the difference in the world. But he remains silent.
He remains silent even as she flees (the silver diadem radiant and gleaming in her long mane of hair). When she has gone, he unsheathes his sword, and the glimmer of sun on the blade reminds him of her. He brings the steel to his lips and thinks of her smile. When he finally catches her in that dark forest, he cries. But she is like stone, as frozen and hard as the sapphires in her mother's diadem. She kisses him and it tastes like cold and pity. But he loves her; he loves her, though she does not want to see it. He opens his mouth to speak, but he was always clumsy with his words. He could always speak better with his sword. She turns and her eyes are bright, her sleeves trail in the black leaves, and there is a silver glimmer in a twisted tree somewhere behind her. He embraces her at last, and her blood is as hot as his own.
III: Regulus Black
Regulus Black dies for the beliefs he holds dear. Regulus Black is young and puts up a fight even as he is torn into pieces in that black and pitiless cave. He is too young to have known many things, love and peace and happiness in a world that had been torn apart by wars from the time he was born—the cold war between his parents, the childish struggle against his brother, the fight to choose, choose, choose a side so young. Through it all, his ideals had stayed with him like a cold mistress. Every night as he sleeps, he imagines a better future—a future where children know peace, and war is something foreign, and he dreams black and white dreams that never lead anywhere.
The tales of his childhood follow him to his watery grave. The whispers of the elf in his ears, murmuring stories and histories as his parents shout at his brother downstairs, the books painted with their moving images—they remain with him to the end. He had once thought when the charming Tom Riddle came to him dressed in silver and black like a hero out of the stories, that this was the peace of his ideals. But on his coattails, Riddle brought chaos and death. And the children's wide eyes and frightened cries had never left Regulus—those children were his past, come again, and he watched them die even as he died, powerless and betrayed. So he became the traitor then, even as he remained true to the only thing he cherished.
IV: Severus Snape
Severus Snape dies for a friend, who was so much more than a mere friend. She was a promise and a hope. She was the magic that could not be found in his veins, the magic that could not be found in the gloomy mill town. She was the colour that held out a torch for the future. Perhaps when he was nine, or seventeen, he thought that he loved her. But he does not think of that when he greets death, in the end. He thinks of the green in her eyes and how they had resembled the watery glow of his Slytherin common room on the first night, and his own wonder reflected back. It is that. That lost and wandering child, and all those, like that child, who will come afterward that he mourns for. He dies for.
That last year at Hogwarts felt like the end of years. It was a long and grey year, and almost all the children's eyes had stared back into his, reflecting his own blankness. They were the eyes of mill workers with twisted hands and stony lungs who had filed out along cracked concrete streets at the same time every evening of his childhood. But it was the other children he spared his hatred for. He had thought that he would burn if he looked into Weasley's or Longbottom's too long. It's penance. He had forced himself to look into their green-shaded gazes every breakfast and every time the Carrows decide to punish them. It kept him upright. And it reminded him of what this all means just as well as Lily's photograph in his breast pocket.
V: Narcissa Malfoy (who lived)
Narcissa Malfoy did not die, though it would have been easy enough. After the Dark Lord was defeated, many wives poisoned themselves rather than live to face their shame, but Narcissa did not die. She walked through the courtrooms and the hearings and the short interludes in Azkaban with her head held stiff. She gripped her husband's hand tightly when she could, and they clung to each other during the nights, more tightly that they ever had before. She did not know whether it was still the old habitual act of being Mrs. Malfoy or whether they had at last forged some sort of bond, the kind of bond that might have existed between two fellow prisoners. Lucius was mostly silent; stirring only to talk to Draco.
Oh Draco. To Narcissa he was everything. Her loyalty was only for him, through all these years. Narcissa did not know anything else more certain. He was her flesh entirely—raised at her beast and sat on her knee. She was his mother and provider. One day, she knows, Draco will make his mother great: oh perhaps not in the way that most think of Slytherins, not through titles and offices and gold, but he would make Narcissa great in his own way. Narcissa's greatness will be the devotion as he looks into her face and the bare-tooth smiles that he would bestow only upon her and his vows to prove her innocent after the war. Narcissa's greatness is very much like love, and it is her own. And so she lived.